The Third Revelation

by Ralph McInerny

  I

  “I actually fell asleep.”

  In the garden, under a palm tree, seated on a stone bench with his finger marking his place in his breviary, Bishop Catena succumbed to distraction.

  His first reaction to the news of Brendan Crowe’s death was that justice had been done, but this was unworthy of him and he pushed the thought away. But there were more unworthy thoughts to come.

  Documents were missing from the Vatican Archives, there was no doubt about it. There were too many rumors to that effect; not all of them were consistent, but the net effect was inescapable. Catena was left to contemplate the fact that Sister Lucia’s letter, the third secret, had been spirited out of the archives. And by whom better than by Crowe. Who had then flown off to America.

  “Trepanier,” Harris said.

  “But why?”

  Harris cleared his throat. “Perhaps he thought he would make more effective use of it.”

  It was almost refreshing to have it said. Ever since Jean-Jacques Trepanier had burst onto the scene, Catena had felt that the confraternity was threatened. He had been in Europe too long. He had lost the American knack for promotion. For advertisement. The confraternity had become as dusty and irrelevant as the dicasteries it grumbled about. Dear God, imagine what a showman like Trepanier could do with a secret message from the Blessed Virgin Mary.

  “And money,” Harris added.

  Money. Catena stared at Harris, who closed his eyes and nodded, a great Buddha of a man. There were three things that undermined a priestly vocation: sex, drink, and money. Those wholly immune to the lures of two of these seemed almost helpless before the blandishments of the third. The lure of sensual pleasure, mastered and controlled in one form, could spring up in another and overpower a soul. Eternal vigilance, that was the key. As for drink, it was now more or less received opinion that it was more of a disease than a moral fault when a man became the toy of alcohol. But both of these vices, sex and drink, were concrete, of the earth, far more human that the abstract lure of money.

  For money is an abstraction and has become ever more so. From pieces and bags of rare metals, shaped, imprinted, and carried about—the coins of previous civilizations were scattered about the world—to paper certificates, to numbers entered in a ledger, we have come to mere digits on a computer monitor. One’s money is anywhere and nowhere. Any ATM in the world enabled one to tap into his funds, but where were they? The question no longer made sense. How could anyone be led astray by so ephemeral a thing?

  Catena developed these thoughts aloud, with Harris as his audience. They stood and paced the graveled paths of the garden, slowly because of Harris’s bulk. They paused to look at the fountain in the center of the garden from which water dripped indecisively rather than flowed, then resumed their walk to the far wall where terra-cotta figures were embedded in the stone.

  “Father Burke is back in Rome,” Harris said.

  Catena had to think. The young priest with whom Crowe had flown off in a private plane. And then the epiphany came.

  “No,” he said to Harris, as if continuing a previous line of conversation. “Not Trepanier, Ignatius Hannan.”

  Harris considered the thought and found it good.

  “I want you to go talk with Father Burke. It is time for direct approaches,” said Catena.

  “He is a resident in Domus Sanctae Marthae. Within the walls of the Vatican.” Harris, a devout sede vacantist, shuddered.

  “You must. This damnable uncertainty must be overcome. Who has the third secret and what do they intend to do with it?”

  Harris took a 64 bus to the Vatican, entering and leaving the vehicle with an effort, because of his weight, and stood for a time in the Via della Conciliazione looking at the massive basilica and the circling colonnades that seemed to reach out for him. Harris had been ordained in Saint Peter’s, by the pope himself, the real Paul VI, not the imposter with the odd earlobes.

  He started off to his left, entered the colonnade, and walked between its huge pillars until he left it and walked with his head down toward the gate manned by two Swiss Guards. They saluted, and one stepped forward and asked for his identification. Harris took the pyx from his inner pocket and displayed it. The guard jumped aside, making the sign of the cross, and Harris passed through. That an empty pyx should have such an effect seemed to him a metaphor of what the Church had become.

  As he walked, the great bells of the basilica began to ring twelve, and from near and far in the city other bells chimed in. Harris had never seen the Domus before. John Paul II had it built for resident and visiting prelates, but there were mere priests there as well, and John Burke was one of them. The doors slid open as he approached them, and Harris entered.

  “He is at lunch,” the woman behind the desk told him. She indicated the closed glass doors.

  “I will wait for him.”

  “Would you like me to show you where the chapel is?”

  She took him there and left him. He went toward the wall beyond which the old external wall of the Vatican was visible through the windows. He sat in a chair at the back and looked at the tabernacle and found it impossible to feel that he was in the stronghold of the enemy. The enemy must remain remote and anonymous. In wartime, soldiers fraternized across the lines, their belligerency diminished by the realization that they faced only frightened boys like themselves. He closed his eyes. How tired he felt. He was getting old.

  “Father?”

  Harris came awake with a start. The young priest put a hand on his shoulder.

  “I’m sorry. Were you asking for me? I am John Burke.”

  “Yes, yes. Do you know, I actually fell asleep.”

  Something like disappointment showed on the young priest’s face. “You’re not from Ireland.”

  He explained what he meant after they left the chapel—when the young priest genuflected Harris heard the sound of his knee hitting the marble floor; he himself settled for a bow—and had gone into the almost deserted dining room. He had thought that perhaps Harris had been sent from Ireland to hear about a priest who had recently died in America.

  “Brendan Crowe,” Harris said.

  “Did you know him?” A lilt of hope.

  “Not nearly so well as I would have liked,” Harris said carefully. He had the sense of chatting with someone in the opposite trench.

  “Have you eaten?”

  Harris made a dismissive gesture, but Burke flagged down a little woman busy among the tables.

  “Sister, Father hasn’t eaten yet. Is it too late?”

  A toothy little smile. She could bring some soup and some pasta. Meanwhile, Burke had taken a bottle from the center of the table and poured Harris a glass of wine.

  “I hope red is all right.”

  “I was hungry and you fed me.” Harris smiled. He felt that he was being welcomed home.

  “Now then,” Burke said, having supervised Harris’s emptying his soup bowl and making good headway in the pasta. He was refilling Harris’s glass. He poured half a glass for himself.

  “You mentioned Brendan Crowe,” Harris began. “We have heard upsetting rumors that he took a most important file from the archives with him to America.”

  “What file?”

  “We had heard earlier that this important file was missing from the archives.”

  He seemed genuinely puzzled by these remarks. “You speak of ‘we.’ ”

  The moment of truth. Harris had little doubt what would be thought of the Confraternity of Pius IX here, if it was thought of at all. All this hospitality and kindness would doubtless evaporate if he gave a frank answer to the question. Fortunately, they were interrupted by a little priest hardly five feet tall, with wispy, uncut gray hair falling over his ears.

  “Father Pouvoir,” John Burke said. “Just the man. Father Harris has put some questions to me that I simply cannot answer. I mean to which I do not have the answers. They concern the archives.” Burke had stood and now beamed at Harris. “Father P
ouvoir works in the archives. I leave you in excellent hands.”

  “Thank you, Father Burke. Thank you very much.” Harris actually raised his glass to the young priest.

  Father Pouvoir sat and looked at Harris with pale, lidless eyes.

  “It was very unwise of you to come here.”

  II

  A priest in the family!

  Remi was the seventh child in a family of thirteen that had scrabbled for a lean existence on a stony little farm located between Montreal and Quebec City. He was a quiet child, unnervingly so, sitting off in a corner seeming to observe the family of which he was a member. Like many children before him, he dreamed that his parents were not his parents, his brothers and sisters not his brothers and sisters. He imagined he was a foundling, brought home and raised as one would take in a lost dog. His silence annoyed his father, who beat him regularly, but then he beat all his children, while his mother wept and prayed that the punishment would soon be over. She might have meant her own.

  School had not drawn him from his shell. It was there, noting with wonder that the other children found the lessons difficult, that he realized he didn’t. Better to keep it a secret, and he did, striving to keep his performance down to the level of his classmates. It was M. L’Abbé Garnier who discovered that Remi was different. For one thing, he memorized the Latin responses an altar boy must know in an hour, rattling them off as if they were his native tongue. Father Garnier made inquiries at the school. Remi Pouvoir? Average, maybe less. The priest took Remi into his study and poured him a cup of coffee.

  “Would you like to learn Latin?”

  Remi was wary. Kindness was not something with which he had much acquaintance. After a moment, he nodded.

  And so it began. The priest and Remi seemed engaged in a conspiracy. The Pouvoirs need not be told that they had at least one precocious child. Remi learned Latin and then Greek, and Father Garnier could hardly contain his joy when Remi was sight-reading the Iliad before the year was out. He began to talk to Remi of the priesthood.

  What he stressed were the studies, the vistas that would be opened up. Where else could a poor boy receive such an education? The seminary was the thing. The Pouvoirs were struck dumb when the pastor went to them.

  “Remi?”

  “God is calling him to the priesthood,” Abbé Garnier said solemnly.

  A priest in the family! Suddenly all the difficult years, the poverty and worry, seemed to have a point.

  Remi went off to the Petit Seminaire in Quebec and eventually on to the Grand Seminaire. During these years he noticed, as he had in school, that the others had difficulties that he did not. Of course he did not draw attention to this, but neither did he try to mimic them. Effortlessly, he absorbed philosophy and then theology, advancing step-by-step to ordination. When his parents first saw him in his soutane and with the great circular tonsure shaved on the back of his head, they treated him with awe. Remi half expected them to ask him for his blessing. A few years later, he was ordained at twenty-three, a special dispensation having been obtained because of his age. The priesthood continued to be the means, not the end, of his existence. It was study he loved. He was sent off to the Institut Catholique in Paris. Later he was enrolled in the École de Chartes. He spent hours in the Bibliotheque Nationale. It was there that he met Fernand.

  Because of Fernand he learned Arabic, which he found easier than Hebrew. For some years he had moved through the streets of the City of Light, going from his residence to class or library, oblivious to all around him. With Fernand he acquired some sense of the lively city in which he lived, but it seemed a terrible waste of time to sit for hours in a café, talking and watching the parade of people go by their table. He spoke little, listened much. At first his French Canadian accent had drawn comment; within a week he was speaking comme il faut, as a Parisian. Learning seemed the donning of a mask, of a new persona. The real Remi Pouvoir got lost in all the roles he learned to play. Fernand took him to a Masonic lodge. So that was Fernand’s persona: the dismantling of Christendom, ridding the world of superstition, leading it, or at least some, the elite, to the worship of the Great Architect. Up until that time, Remi’s knowledge of Freemasonry had been derived from War and Peace and reading de Maistre. He agreed to be initiated in much the same way as he had agreed to enter the seminary, in order to learn. He missed Fernand when he went back to Cairo.

  Ladislaw, a priest from Poland, arrived in the residence where Remi lived in order to study at the École de Chartes. He asked Remi for advice, and Remi found that he enjoyed playing the role of the senior scholar although he was but a few years older than Ladislaw. In those days, it seemed unusual for a Pole to be permitted to study outside his country. Ladislaw did not seem hostile to the Communist government. No wonder. When he spoke of the way the Party had recruited young men to study for the priesthood with an eye to controlling the Church, Remi had the feeling that Ladislaw was talking of himself. The two young men sensed that they were subversives. When Remi, armed with his degree, went on to the Vatican Archives, he kept in touch with Ladislaw, or perhaps vice versa would be more accurate. With the election of John Paul II, Ladislaw came to Rome, hoping to find employment in the Vatican, now that his countryman was in the Chair of Peter. Alas, Ladislaw’s connections were no secret to Karol Wojtila; the archives were closed to Ladislaw.

  “What will you do?”

  Ladislaw was thoughtful. Poland had changed; it was no place he wished to go back to. But where was an unemployed paleographer to find employment? He was taken on by the Goethe Institute in Rome. They had dinner together at least once a week.

  III

  And so they flew off to Fatima.

  Before leaving for Fatima with Zelda, Gabriel Faust set in motion the main thing that had prompted Ignatius Hannan to hire him as director of the Refuge of Sinners Foundation.

  Inagaki repeated the name. “Sounds like a prison.”

  “Far from it, my dear fellow. Indeed quite the opposite. It will free us from the cares that have beset our lives hitherto.”

  Silence on the line. Faust told himself not to overdo it, but the recent change in his fortune had brought back an ebullience long lying dormant beneath those cares of which he spoke to Inagaki.

  “This is what you are to do,” he told Inagaki.

  He had the list made out by Brendan Crowe on the desk before him. Before he could get to the third item, Inagaki interrupted.

  “Do you know where those paintings are?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do.” Faust read off the cities and museums from the list.

  “And the first two are six thousand miles apart.”

  Gabriel soothed the anxiety of his longtime partner and collaborator. “Your travel expenses will of course be added to your fee, and living expenses while you accomplish your task. And I think we will increase your fee. Say by doubling it.”

  “You’ve been drinking.”

  “No, I have married.”

  “Married,” Inagaki repeated.

  “You will recognize her name perhaps. Zelda Lewis.”

  “Delacroix.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Wives cannot testify against husbands,” Inagaki observed.

  “And how is Mrs. Inagaki?”

  “There is no Mrs. Inagaki.”

  “Well, you will be able to afford her now.”

  It was a long conversation, one in which the layers of skepticism and wariness had to be peeled away one by one to arrive at the hidden core of Inagaki’s mistrustful soul.

  “I want it in writing,” Inagaki said.

  “Of course you want it in writing. And what would you consider an adequate bonus on signing the agreement?”

  Magnanimity came easily after the long years of penury. Marriage to Zelda alone, given her wealth, would have more than answered his prayers. He had reached an age when security assumed overweening importance. As a young man, he had survived long, barren stretches because the future remained, and all his
hopes and dreams. Alas, experience taught how elusive the objects of hopes and dreams could be. What was wanted was something sure, however modest. No wonder people tailored their lives to the potential of their Social Security checks. When Zelda became Mrs. Gabriel Faust in the sacristy of Santa Susanna in Rome, he had felt the raveled sleeve of care drop away. And now there was the all but bottomless largesse with which Ignatius Hannan had endowed Refuge of Sinners. No longer dependent on her wealth, he discovered in himself new depths of devotion for Zelda.

  “Bottomless,” he said, slapping her bare behind.

  “Oh Gabriel.”

  Oh Gabriel, indeed. If this be second childhood, play on.

  And so they flew off to Fatima. First-class.

  Of late, Gabriel had made a study of Marian shrines, Lourdes first, prompted by the replica of its grotto behind the administration building in the Empedocles complex. The replica retained the rustic air of the original, but Gabriel had studied photographs of the industry that had grown up because of the influx of pilgrims. Not simply the hospitals where putative cures were carefully checked, but the long gauntlet of a street leading to the shrine. A street flanked by shops offering every conceivable kind of religious trinket and souvenir. When they deplaned at Lisbon and had been driven in a hired car to the site of the apparitions, Gabriel was prepared for kitsch.

  He was pleasantly surprised.

  The car dropped them at the end of the huge plaza across which pilgrims were progressing on their knees toward the church, many of them having rented knee pads to make the penance tolerable. To their left, as they approached the church, was a structure near the tree that had figured in the apparitions.

  Inside the church, Zelda knelt, and Gabriel, after only a moment’s hesitation, joined her. The semblance of devotion came easily in his present euphoria. He had grown accustomed to accompanying her to Mass, and she had shown no surprise when he had not gone forward to receive Communion. What would be a plausible excuse?